99.99% uptime for Azure Active Directory

by Contributed | Dec 18, 2020 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Today, I’m pleased to announce that we are taking the next step in our commitment to the resilience and availability of Azure AD. On April 1, 2021, we will update our public service level agreement (SLA) to promise 99.99% uptime for Azure AD user authentication, an improvement over our previous 99.9% SLA.  This change is the result of a significant and ongoing program of investment in continually raising the bar for resilience of the Azure AD service. We will also share our roadmap for the next generation of resilience investments for Azure AD and Azure AD B2C in early 2021.

Because our identity services are vital to keep customer businesses running, resilience and security are and always will be our top priority. In the last year, we’ve seen a surge in demand as organizations moved workforces online and schools enabled study from home—in fact, some national education systems moved entire student populations online with Azure AD. Azure AD is now serving more than 400 million Monthly Active Users (MAU) and processing tens of billions of authentications per day. We treat every one of those authentication requests as a mission critical operation.  

In conversations with our customers, we learned that the most critical promise of our service is ensuring that every user can sign in to the apps and services they need without interruption. To deliver on this promise, we are updating the definition of Azure AD SLA availability to include only user authentication and federation (and removing administrative features). This focus on critical user authentication scenarios aligns our engineering investments with the vital functions that must stay healthy for customers businesses to run.

Of course, we will continue to improve reliability in all areas of Microsoft identity services. Last year, we shared our approach and architectural investments to drive availability of Azure AD. I’m pleased to share significant progress completed since then.

1. We’ve made strong progress on moving the authentication services to a fine-grained fault domain isolation model — also called “cellularized architecture”. This architecture is designed to scope and isolate the impact of many classes of failures to a small percentage of total users in the system. In the last year, we’ve increased the number of fault domains by over 5x and will continue to evolve this further over the next year.
   
   


2. We have begun rollout of an Azure AD Backup Authentication service that runs with decorrelated failure modes from the primary Azure AD system. This backup service transparently and automatically handles authentications for participating workloads as an additional layer of resilience on top of the multiple levels of redundancy in Azure AD. You can think of this as a backup generator or uninterrupted power supply (UPS) designed to provide additional fault tolerance while staying completely transparent and automatic to you. At present, Outlook Web Access and SharePoint Online are integrated with this system. We will roll out the protections across critical Microsoft apps and services over the next few quarters.

3. For Azure infrastructure authentication, our managed identity for Azure resources capabilities are now transparently integrated with regional authentication endpoints. These regional endpoints provide significant additional layers of resilience and protection, even in the event of an outage in the primary Azure AD authentication system.
   
   


4. We’ve continued to make investments in the scalability and elasticity of the service. These investments were proven out during the early days of the COVID crisis, when we saw surging growth in demand. We were able to seamlessly scale what is already the world’s largest enterprise authentication system without impact. This included not just aggregate growth but very rapid onboarding, including entire nations moving their school systems (millions of users) online overnight.
   
   


5. We are rolling out innovations to the authentication system such as Continuous Access Evaluation Protocol for critical Microsoft 365 services (CAE). CAE both improves security by providing instant enforcement of policy changes and improves resilience by securely providing longer token lifetimes.

The above are just some examples of the key resilience investments we have made that have enabled us to raise the public SLA to 99.99%. We will have more to share in 2021 on the next generation of resilience investments for Azure AD and Azure AD B2C.

Planning for resilience in your identity estate

We know many customers are also asking for guidance on how best to configure and use Azure AD in the most resilient patterns – to help you understand how to build resilience into your identity and access management estate, we’ve published technical guidance that provides best practices for building resilience into the policies you create.

• For building resilience into employee identity policies as an identity architect or admin, see Build resilience in your IAM infrastructure with Azure Active Directory


• For information on resilient identity practices in app development, see Increase resilience of authentication and authorization applications you develop – Microsoft identity platform


• For best practices on building resilience into your customer-facing identity systems, see Build resilience in Customer Identity and Access Management using Azure AD B2C

Thank you for your ongoing trust and partnership.

Year of the Nurse and Midwife: Wrapping up 2020

by Contributed | Dec 18, 2020 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Resources:

1. AHA Course Artificial Intelligence and the Path to Health Care Innovation | AHA News


2. ANA Bot (Wellbeing) Coronavirus | Well-Being Initiative | Mental Health | ANA (nursingworld.org)


3. NurseHack4Health Blog from Marc Inspiring nursing innovation for COVID-19 and beyond – Microsoft in Business Blogs


4. WW blog Year of the Nurse: First responders build resilience with technology and data – Microsoft News Centre Europe


5. YOTNM WW video https://youtu.be/Wnd-84FMG7o

Claire Bonaci 

The World Health Organization designated 2020 as the year of the nurse and midwife to raise awareness of nurses and midwives, significant and varied roles in healthcare. On this episode, Molly McCarthy and Kathleen McGrow reflect on the big accomplishments for 2020, the year of the nurse midwife, and how we can continue our support for nurses and midwives in 2021.  Hi Kahtleen and Hi, Molly, and thank you for coming on the podcast to discuss the year of the nurse and midwife.

Molly McCarthy 

Thanks, Claire. It’s great to be here today.

Kathleen McGrow 

Hi, Claire, good to see you.

Claire Bonaci 

So 2020 was the the year of the nurse and midwife by the World Health Organization. As we enter 2020. Molly, do you have a feel that this year achieved what intended to at the beginning of the year?

Molly McCarthy 

Yeah, that’s a great question. And I can certainly say that going coming into 2020 is not exactly how we imagined the year of the nurse midwife would be it was designated in 2019, to really raise awareness of nurses and midwives, varied roles in health care, and increase investment in education and training and leadership throughout the world. And I think it was evident very early on in the year that, you know, nurses are an integral part of our health system, from the bed side all the way to the boardroom, in terms of patient care, and interacting with the care team and family. So I would say 110%, yes, we’ve definitely seen an elevation and in the role of nurses, through media, through storytelling, here at Microsoft, just our support, which we’ll talk about. And due to the pandemic, it really shone a light on the profession.

Claire Bonaci 

100% I definitely think that, you know, no one really thought going into 2020, that there was going to be a worldwide pandemic. And then nurses really got we’re going to be the frontline workers and the ones kind of dealing with all of it. So Kathleen, you were integral to many of the year of the nurse and midwife events and accomplishments, what were some of the biggest accomplishments this year for the nurse and midwife? And how did Microsoft take part in that?

Kathleen McGrow 

So you’re correct, Claire, I think under Molly’s purview, we really worked hard and diligently to bring the year of the nurse to Microsoft, so that our counterparts and our peers at Microsoft really knew what it was about. And you know, we educated our peers, internal to Microsoft, but then we really worked with the nurses in our community, and that we work with all the time. So I think some of our big biggest accomplishments were really around working to build relationships within our nursing community, promoting our nursing colleagues innovations, elevating the voice of nurses within health information technology, which I think due to COVID, there actually has been a significant amount of visibility to nurses that were maybe there wasn’t previously. So that might be one light at the end of the COVID tunnel. And then I think that we really look to support a culture of innovation within our health system. So nurses, I believe, as a nurse, were we’ve always been innovative, but maybe we just didn’t know how to get the innovation out into the eye of the patient and what we’re doing the patient care. And I think that with COVID-19, there’s a lot of innovations that nurses did even on the fly, that, you know, we can talk about, and really recognize and I think that really helped with year of the nurse and promoting those nurses. So as a collective group, highly innovative group. And really, we should be recognizing them. I think all the time. I think the year the nurse was kind of ironic this year, right? It really was something that we were doing to promote the profession. And wow, we really got a lot of promotion out of COVID.

Claire Bonaci 

And, Molly, do you have anything to add to that?

Molly McCarthy 

Yeah, so I think both, you know, as Kathleen mentioned, internally, just educating our team’s within the healthcare organization across Microsoft was part of our mission. And truly, as Kathleen said, and then working directly with our customers. The other piece that we really took on this year, was thinking about who can we partner with in the marketplace, to, you know, elevate the role of nurses, rather than, you know, take it on ourselves, but who’s out there. And so, three different projects that I want to take a minute to mention. The first is what we did in partnership with the American Hospital Association that actually started well over a year ago, but essentially looking to provide frontline clinicians, including nurses, doctors, as well as healthcare administrators with a foundation in what a artificial intelligence is in healthcare and what that means as a nurse as a clinician. So the program is a free virtual course that provides one continuing ed contact hour and it’s available for the next couple of years. So I highly suggest you know, if you’re listening to take a look at it, The second piece is a project, we work with the American Nurses Association. So here in the US, there are about 4 million nurses. And obviously, with COVID-19, the stress of the pandemic, and the pressure on our nurses is just been, you know, excruciating to see and to watch the images of, you know, the masks on the face and the skin damage, as well as just dealing with the family. And the patients day after day really took a toll. So we work to create a health bot, actually, with ANA as part of their well being initiative, and it resides on their well being initiative website. It’s a 10 question, stress self assessment checker, for any nurse can go on and go through a series of questions like a decision tree, and then at the end, we’ll provide them with different resources. We’ve had many, I think, well over 3000 nurses in the past couple months take it, we hope to share more statistics around it. And then the last thing that I would love to take a few minutes, because it’s truly been a highlight of my career. And and thank you to Kathleen for being involved is our nurse hack for health. We entered into 2019 thinking, how can we continue to bring nurses into the fold in the design, the development and deployment of technology, and really, truly understand how we can marry them with developers, IT to create solutions that make sense in terms of the clinical workflow, but then make sense for better patient outcomes. So we launched the nurse hack for health in partnership with Johnson and Johnson and Sonseil. We had our first hack in May, we just completed our second hack. And for more information on that, because we have some great resources, we’ll put something in we’ll put a link in at the end of the podcast. But that was really, truly a phenomenal process of getting not just nurses in the United States. But throughout the world. This past hack, we had eight different countries represented.

Claire Bonaci 

Well, thank you, Molly, for describing all of that. I know you both worked incredibly hard on the nurse hack for health and all of the other initiatives. And they’re actually podcasts for all of those initiatives as well. So I will link those below. Molly, Kathleen, I know you’re both very passionate about this. What are some 2021 goals to support nurses, even as you’re the nurse and midwife comes to an end. Kathleen, do you wanna start?

Kathleen McGrow 

Sure. So obviously, we really don’t feel it’s coming to an end. Right, it will continue for us because we do feel that we would like to continue to educate our internal teams as well as nurses. You know, based on the sources that Molly even talked about how we can can we continue to grow those different offerings. We also want to raise our voices, to be able to be influencers and get the word out about nurses, Molly and I are nurses in a large health IT Corporation. So it’s our responsibility to educate folks, both internally and then and educate and influence both internally and externally, I feel and then how can we really work to accelerate digital transformation and innovation? And how do we leverage the innovation that the nurses in the field, you know, that they’re coming up with? How do we help them promote those innovations?

Claire Bonaci 

Molly, do you have anything to add?

Molly McCarthy 

Yeah, no, I think Kathleen did a great job of summarizing it, you know, to her point, we we don’t want to end. We’ve supported nurses for for several years here at Microsoft through partnerships, with HIMSS, and other organizations with our nursing informatics roundtables every year etc. So our goal is to continue to raise the bar here at Microsoft internally in terms terms of making it inclusive, as we look to design and develop solutions that make sense and impact clinical workflow, for example, teams right now that we’re using. And then I think, too, as we move forward, you know, our goal is to continue with our podcasts, as well as our social media outreach, blogs, etc. I know that Kathleen and myself are avid writers. So that’s part of what we do. The other piece that I want to mention is we’re lucky enough that our teams expanded this year when we actually just hired a new chief nursing officer, a new chief patient experience officer who happens to be a nurse practitioner, and we look forward to bringing on another clinician at the beginning of January to really help us expand in our health plan space. So you know, 2021, we’re ready for you and we’re excited to continue the work we’ve started in 2020.

Claire Bonaci 

There really is so much momentum with Year of the nurse and midwife, and I’m very excited o see it continue into 2021. And my last question for you both is how can listeners get involved in supporting nurses and midwives moving forward

Molly McCarthy 

Well, I think, you know, I did mention the well being initiative that’s really to support nurses resilience. So that’s one effort through the American Nurses foundation. I encourage you, if you’re listening to please go out and take a look at that, in terms of how you can help that organization as we support our nurses. In addition, I want to welcome everyone listening and not listening, quite frankly, to the next nurse hack for health that’s taking place may 14 to 16th. Again, we’ll do that virtual. And then Kathleen, I know you always have some parting words of wisdom, so I’m going to turn it over to you.

Kathleen McGrow 

Yep, it’s the shock trauma nurse me my advice. And what I ask of everyone how we can support our nurses and nurse midwives is to wear a mask, social distance and wash your hands.

Claire Bonaci 

Great. Thank you so much, Kathleen. Thank you so much, Molly, for being on the podcast and explaining a little bit more of all of the work that has gone on in the year the nurse and midwife here at Microsoft.

Molly McCarthy 

Great. Thanks so much for your support. Claire.

Claire Bonaci 

Thank you all for watching. Please feel free to leave us questions or comments below and check back soon for more content from the HLS industry team.

Customer Key support for Microsoft Teams now in Public Preview!

by Contributed | Dec 18, 2020 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

In September, at Microsoft Ignite, we shared that Customer Key support for Microsoft Teams would become available for public preview at the end of 2020 – we are now happy to share it’s here for public preview!

Microsoft Teams helps keep data safe by encrypting it while at rest in Microsoft data centers, starting with volume-level encryption enabled through BitLocker while service encryption ensures that content at rest is encrypted at the application layer. Customer Key is built on service encryption and provides an added layer of encryption at the application level for data-at-rest and allows you as the organization to control the encryption keys.

Customer Key helps you meet compliance obligations because you control the encryption keys that Microsoft 365 uses to encrypt and decrypt data, enhancing your ability to meet the demands of compliance requirements that specify key arrangements with the cloud service provider.

Already available in Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive, this extension into Teams will be offered as a preview. You can now assign a single data encryption policy at the tenant level to encrypt your data-at-rest in Teams and Exchange. For more details, please see Overview of Customer Key for Microsoft 365 at the tenant level.

Empowering—Dona Sarkar’s passion for upskilling people around the world

by Contributed | Dec 18, 2020 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

This is the third of a three-part series on the ways that Microsoft Power Platform empowers people with no coding experience to upskill and quickly learn how to create apps to solve business problems or problems they’ve identified in their local communities. The first post, Empowering—Gomolemo Mohapi’s journey from student to Microsoft Power Platform advocate, focused on this young South African student’s path to becoming an app maker. The second post, Empowering—Joe Camp’s path from no-code to Microsoft Power Platform advocate, features the career switch and journey to app maker of one of Mohapi’s colleagues on the Microsoft Power Platform Advocacy team. Today’s post tells the story of how Dona Sarkar, team lead, built the Microsoft Power Platform Advocacy team. To hear Sarkar, Mohapi, and Camp talk about their experience with Microsoft Power Platform, listen to this Digital Lifestyle podcast.

Dona Sarkar, lead for the Microsoft Power Platform Advocacy team, is a person who brings her own unique perspective and energy to whatever she touches. She asks questions, notices problems or opportunities for change, brings her creativity to them, and then does something to make a difference in the world. Helping people around the world upskill with Microsoft Power Platform is by no means the whole of her story, but it is one of her great passions.

When Sarkar was working as the “Chief #NinjaCat” of the Windows Insider Program at Microsoft, a community of people in every country/region in the world—even Antarctica—who give feedback on Windows releases before they goes out to public, she noticed something was missing. Windows Insiders are passionate about technology, she says, and they’re also passionate about other people learning and using technology, which is why their input is so valuable. But most of the Windows Insider feedback they were getting came from the United States and Western Europe. How could they build a good product for everyone in the world, she wondered, if they didn’t have feedback from other places, countries/regions, and cultures with different circumstances and needs? Not everyone has 24/7 online access, for example, so the requirement to be online to sign in to Windows doesn’t work in many places.

So, what did she do? She and her team got on planes and traveled to places all over the world—Jakarta, Malaysia, Ghana, Tanzania, Nigeria, South Africa, and more—to find out what those other needs were. The team found that people in developing countries/regions wanted to help their peers and colleagues who were not as technical as they were to skill up to improve their lives and get better jobs. So, while she was in South Africa, Sarkar focused on talking to people about how to organize an upskilling program Microsoft could sponsor and on finding people who might help with leading this locally. That’s how she met Gomolemo Mohapi, who had traveled from his home in Durban to Microsoft Ignite The Tour in Johannesburg in 2019. Mohapi, a college student at the time, was already “a big Microsoft follower—a huge .NET fan and a Windows Insider.” He told Sarkar he thought they really needed just such a program in South Africa. What really inspired her was that this young student, who was working hard and getting good grades, was taking time to help other students learn—for free. She was so inspired by the work he was doing that she and her team started building out an upskilling program, #InsiderUp, with Mohapi as the inspiration.

Envisioning and creating the Microsoft Power Platform Advocacy team

A year later, Sarkar was asked to head up a new Developer Advocacy team for Microsoft Power Platform, focused on getting people to understand this new technology’s potential to help them. She was interested in how it might help workers already in jobs, but she also asked different questions that led her in another direction. “How do we get people all over the world into jobs? What about the people who don’t know what Microsoft Power Platform is, who don’t know that it’s a really quick way to build app development skills? That with these tools, people who aren’t software engineers like me, people with no developer skills at skill, can very easily build websites, chatbots, workflows, and automation?”

So, what did Sarkar do? She was so inspired by Microsoft Power Platform and its potential to help upskill people around the world, especially in places where computer science degrees are expensive and very difficult to get, that she started sketching out a team centered on upskilling people no matter what background they came from.

Sarkar identified three audiences her team would serve all over the world: students under 25 who might be a little lost career-wise, with no one to guide them into technology so they could get a better job; mid-career workers who wanted to do better at their jobs or to switch jobs or careers; and classic software developers who wanted to do their job more efficiently and to write and debug less code. When it came time to hire, she wanted to work with people who were passionate about upskilling and who already doing this work, so she hired “three people who were the best in the world at what they do.” To head the Student Ambassador program, she hired Mohapi. For the mid-career/career switch position, she hired Joe Camp. And for the developer position, Greg Hurlman.

Her team, the Microsoft Power Platform Advocacy team, was ready to go in July 2020. “There’s so many people we can help,” she realized after they were up and running. And they have. From the get-go, they’ve been extremely busy. They’re constantly creating new content, organizing events, helping train people, and maintaining a job board where they post Microsoft Power Platform jobs. In just the few months her team has been working together, they’ve put on 3 conferences, spoken at over 100 events, and created 50 pieces of content—plus, Mohapi kicked off the Microsoft Learn Student Ambassadors Low-Code League.

No chance of this team slowing down. “Our work has just started,” Sarkar says. “We’re going big on international now, which has been our aim from the beginning.” They’re working on a series of events in Africa, called Power Africa, for citizen developers with a range of skills from no code all the way to code-first developers. Sarkar herself is heading up three in-person events in Barbados, called Power Barbados. She’ll be leading a series of workshops for The University of the West Indies there, which will be open to educators and students and to business owners. She’s also recruiting people to do an in-person hackathon there to solve local problems.

And these are just the team’s short-term projects. In January 2021, her team starts moving their advocacy into South America and Latin America, where up until now they’ve done very little work. They plan to work with local Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs), student partners, and others to create Power Latin America/South America.  

Empowering people everywhere to solve local problems, including her own

Sarkar’s commitment to diversity and advocacy for Microsoft Power Platform are part of her life, not just her role as the team leader for Microsoft Power Platform advocacy. In May 2020, she and a friend of hers, along with teams of volunteers from the community, ran a 48-hour virtual hackathon for 390 people from over 40 countries/regions. At #Hack4GoodMBAS, participants used Microsoft Power Platform to build solutions to problems real people were facing in their local communities during the pandemic. One person created an app to connect elderly people who need groceries with designated shoppers. Another created a mental health app to help combat the loneliness many people are feeling right now. That app’s SharePoint list of people willing to connect and talk means people can reach out to those willing to listen and help. The winning app came from New Zealand—an app that enables businesses to scan your signature, so you don’t have to touch a pen or other device to complete a transaction.

“These apps are all so simple,” Sarkar stresses, “and yet they’re enormously helpful.” And most were built in just a few hours by people who were brand new to coding or had minimal coding experience. People can learn how to use Microsoft Power Platform in a day, she says. For the hackathon, she did give participants pre-work, a set of unique learning paths she created for them: a carefully chosen set of Microsoft Learn tutorials—the best of Microsoft Learn—combined with other resources, all on one page. That content is now available as Upskilling Academy for Power Platform, a co-created curriculum designed for people starting from scratch, especially for groups that want to upskill their employees and fellow students together in cohorts or groups.

The curriculum was developed by a Microsoft customer in Nigeria and blends Microsoft Learn content, docs, tutorials, guides, and videos, plus other resources. You can use it as a loose starting point to learn the basics of each aspect of Microsoft Power Platform, including customizing canvas apps, managing apps, working with Common Data Service and model-driven Power Apps, Power Automate, AI Builder, Power Virtual Agents, and Power BI.

During the virtual hackathon, Sarkar and the other helpers “stayed away from technical instruction because we believed people could figure it out on their own.” And they did. “Most people figured it out, and they did it fast.” If someone asked, “How do you use AI to …?,” they wouldn’t show them how to do it but instead would point them in the right direction, saying, “Go look at AI Builder.” People were immensely proud of themselves, she says, because they built something out of nothing to solve a real problem they had identified in their local community. “Anyone can build an app,” she says. You can watch her prove it in the video, Anyone Can Build a Power App—and Today I Prove It. And you can prove it to yourself. If you want to learn how to build apps with low-code techniques to simplify, automate, and transform business tasks and processes, check out this handy Learn Power Apps collection of learning paths on Microsoft Learn. And if you want to learn app-making skills and validate them, explore the Microsoft Power Platform app maker training and certification.

Although Sarkar is a software engineer, she uses Microsoft Power Platform to help solve her own real-life challenges. After being diagnosed with dyslexia four years ago, she realized that many coping mechanisms were available and there was no need to suffer in silence, so she started using the tools in OneNote and other hacks. But when she encountered difficulty reading a teleprompter, she realized that Microsoft Power Platform is actually “a hack for dyslexia.” Looking at an Excel spreadsheet or SharePoint list is very stressful, for example. But if you generate it into a Power App, it’s much easier to decode, even on a phone, because the content is displayed not all at once but one segment at a time. So, what did she do? She created a teleprompter app for herself that pulls from an Excel spreadsheet all the lines she needs to say and displays them on her phone in a way she can easily read, so she knows what’s coming up and can be extra prepared. For her, Power Apps are a “dyslexia coping tool.” And the potential is there for helping to solve other neurodiversity challenges that people experience, too.

The advantages of diverse points of view in the workplace

Hiring is expensive, Sarkar says. “Companies spend so much money hiring people. You have to interview 10,000 people to hire 1,000.” She’s hired over 1,000 people herself, from all over the world. The more you get outside your bubble, your comfort zone, she explains, whether that’s Redmond or any other place, the better hires you’re going to get. You’re not just looking for people who can code in C. You want people who bring a different point of view to whatever problem you’re facing. “Say you’re working in AI and are tagging pictures of people, and you want to tag light skin or dark skin. A person in Nigeria is going to tag a picture very differently than a person in Britain. I consider myself to be a dark-skinned person, but in Nigeria I’m considered to be a light-skinned person.” That subjectivity is true for many things—what we consider good or bad, offensive or funny, for instance. “Many other cultural context issues are missed, as well, like internet connectivity and speed or what hybrid cloud means in different parts of the world, when you build products in Redmond with only an American point of view. The more diverse points of view you have, the better your product or service is going to be.”

That’s why corporations don’t need clones. They need “misfits and weirdos,” Sarkar notes on her website, “the b, entrepreneurial types. The ones who refuse to do the job the way the last guy did it. The ones who hate tracking our work in the tool. The ones that are always creating our own jobs. The ones that are determined to use the power of the corporation to make a real difference in the world.” She calls winning in the corporate world—while being you—the “art of Intrapreneurship.” She still tells herself, “I’m a software engineer. And I’m a fashion designer. I don’t belong at Microsoft.” As you might expect, her colleagues quickly let her know that she indeed does belong. “It’s the people who think they don’t belong who are often the people companies need most, people with different points of view.” People like Sarkar herself, who saw a need to help people in countries/regions all over the world get into jobs by helping them skill up in technology and then set about making that happen in her role at Microsoft.

Working is learning

Intrapreneurial workers need corporations as much as corporations need them. Corporations can help their “crazy” ideas become reality. They provide mentors and support. They give you the opportunity to make mistakes and learn from them, because they provide a buffer of time, money, and people. And they pay you to learn. “You’re always learning on the job,” she notes. “No one expects you to know everything. You may know how to deliver a service for 10,000 people, but who knows how to scale to 1.5 billion?” You’re always being challenged by problems and situations you haven’t dealt with before, so you’re always learning something new. Big companies give you an opportunity to learn. “That’s why I believe Microsoft needs weirdos and weirdos need Microsoft.”

Fast Company lists Sarkar as one of its Most Productive People. It’s hard to disagree. All you have to do is check out her Instagram or Twitter to see what she’s up to currently. Whether working with her Microsoft Power Platform advocacy team, speaking or leading workshops, running hackathons, creating apps, coaching entrepreneurs in emerging markets, designing an ethically made clothing line for women by women, or writing fiction, she’s always taking creative action, doing something to make a difference in the world.

Make some friends somewhere else in the world, Sarkar suggests, and bring them along with you on your adventures. Go forth and #DoTheThing—together.   And check out the new Microsoft Power Platform course at aka.ms/UdacityPower.